27 Just About Toothless

 Realizing the hazards of helping my dad you might think would make me more cautious, not so.  Again we were working on the little D4 when dad asked me to run to the house for some needed pieces of equipment.  You must realize that when my dad said “Run and do this, or run and do that,” that he meant literally to run.  Upon hearing the command to run, off I went as fast as I could.

If you are familiar with driftwood you know that it is polished smooth and devoid of bark from the tide, and very slippery.  Jumping from log to log as fast as I could, I returned to the beach with the needed tool, but this led to my undoing.  It only took one misstep on a slippery log and down I went quicker then you could blink.  In fact I went down so fast that I did not have time to put my hands out to brace myself against the fall, and fall I did, flat out my chin hitting a log so hard as to shatter a half dozen or so of my teeth as my jaw slammed shut.

I can still remember as if it just happed, sitting there spitting out teeth.  It was as if my mouth was full of fine gravel.  In fact I went back later and there on the log was a pile of enamel from my fractured teeth. The one positive thing about this experience was that my tongue was in my mouth or I would have cut it off.

When I told my dad what had happened, up to the house we went to tell mom and phone for a plane.  Then it was off to Campbell River, but this time to see a dentist.  All he could do at the time was to grind off all the sharp edges so my teeth would not cut my mouth or tongue.  To this day some of my teeth still show the results of my fall, as they were broken but not bad enough to be crowned.

My love for dentists as a kid was shaped solely by my yearly trip to Vancouver and a dentist by the name of Painless Parker. My dad took us kids to one of several offices that he ran across the country.  It was our misfortune that he had one in Vancouver.  Painless as part of the name was strictly a ploy to lure the unwary victim in, his true identity is still unknown to me to day.

The day for my dental appointment started as normal but once through the door of the office the terror began.  Remember this was before the day of the high-speed drill when the “device of terror” was powered slowly through a series of pulleys that clacked and rattled overhead.  Going at such a slow speed your whole head would vibrate with the turning of the drill.  The stench of smoking bone as the drill ground its way through rotting dentine was over powering.  And on top of that the freezing was just another means of inflicting more agony, as the freezing never seemed to lesson the pain. This made my heart race and added to the continual need to pee brought on by the terror of the moment.  I used to sit there until I thought I would bust as I was a timid kid and afraid to ask for a pee break.  This being a yearly event I would sit for hours as I always had a lot of teeth that needed fixing and it seemed as if the ordeal would never end. 

The only consolation was that I knew I was not alone in this chamber of horrors as my sister was in the next room going through the same ordeal as I.

The invention of the high-speed drill brought with it considerable relief from the pain and agony that I experienced as a kid. It was so comparatively painless that for years I had just about all of my dental work done with no freezing.

Over the years I have come to accept the needed services of a dentist and the terror of my childhood experiences are but a distant memory, but not to distant.  Writing this has brought it all back but not the pain, at least not all of it.